Rebiya Kadeer

  b. 1947 | Uighur entrepreneur/human rights advocate

At The Bottom

— 1997

She was arrested and received an eight-year sentence.

The 50-year-old mother of 11 looked around at the 50-square-foot room.  “The toilet,” she wrote later, “was nothing more than a hole with a little hose next to it to flush away the waste.  The light bulb in the ceiling fixture had been removed.  The walls were damp, green, and crumbly.” Certainly, Rebiya Kadeer was no stranger to adversity.  Born into poverty, she was also a Uighur, a Turkic ethnic group that for decades have resisted their subordination within the People’s Republic of China.  Kadeer’s family was forcefully removed from their small farm during the “Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s, when millions of Chinese died of starvation and malnutrition produced by rapid agricultural collectivization and massive pushes for rapid industrial growth.  Yet Kadeer had persevered by the late 1990s.  After starting out as the owner of a laundromat in the 1970s, she had leveraged her success and opened a department store in the 1980s.  Eventually, she founded a large trading company, becoming a “millionairess” by the mid-1990s with assets that ranked her as one of the wealthiest people in China.  Throughout her business career, she had been a philanthropist and an advocate for Uighur economic development and political rights.  She was even appointed to be a representative in the National People’s Assembly, the highest (and largely powerless) legislative body in China.  By the late 1990s, her growing activism landed her in trouble with the authorities.  After the Chinese government executed several dozen Uighur independence activists in 1997, Kadeer denounced the government’s conduct on the floor of the Assembly.  In August 1999, she was arrested received an eight-year sentence.